Writing a memoir is essentially about telling your story about a particularly challenging phase of your life. It could be about an illness that affected your life, such as cancer. It could also be something that happened in your childhood and impacted you deeply.
As human beings, we are called to share our stories with others. On that note, if you are planning to write a memoir, you should know about the essential characteristics that make a great memoir.
Read on to learn more.
Write A Character-Driven Memoir
What we essentially mean by writing a character-driven memoir is that your readers have to grow to live with you as the protagonist of your memoir. On that note, you cannot simply assume that the readers of your memoir will automatically be on your side and understand who you are.
Your readers will need to grow to get you and side with you. This aspect indicates that it is your job to win your readers over.
How to Make Your Readers Love You?
One way to make your readers grow to love you as the protagonist of the memoir is by being okay with being vulnerable. Be okay with revealing who you are. Maybe you want to start off the novel by not looking like a prince or princess.
It is a real struggle to connect with people who are just perfect all the time. If you have read classics, such as Oedipus Rex, you know that the perfect protagonist doesn’t exist. We all are flawed, which is why the core of the best memoirs is the flaws and vulnerabilities that you and everyone else have as human beings.
Be Okay with Being Vulnerable
Even if you are talking about your cancer journey in your memoir, you are essentially telling your readers so much more than that. You are telling them a lot about who you were before you got diagnosed with cancer.
You don’t tell your readers who you were – rather – you show them through very carefully-tailored and selected scenes from your life. On that note, if you have an interesting event to share with others that they can seek inspiration from but you don’t have the time to sit down and write, you can hire an experienced memoir writer and let the professional help you with getting your life story out on paper and into the hands of your ideal reader.
When to Follow A Chronological Order
If this is your first time writing, you might think that you will start at the beginning. It must not be the beginning of your life but the beginning of the time that you want to write about. Nonetheless, you might feel the need to start at the beginning and tell your readers about what happened next and so forth.
If you want to write a memoir that people will enjoy reading, you can skip that chronological order. Sometimes, writing in chronological order is incredibly useful and valid.
For instance, if you have had a rare form of cancer and you are writing about your healing journey, then writing in chronological order is advisable. If someone has a similar cancer and is reading your memoir, they will be highly interested in how you overcame the illness. In this example, sticking to a chronological order is fine.
Write the Memoir in Novel-Like Scenes
You should know that the books that people love to read are not written in chronological order. Craft your memoir like a novel. Novels are not written directly chronologically – in most cases. They are written with interjections, and they have interesting discussions about life.
There is a lot of the element of an understanding of the bigger picture of what is going on, along with an articulation of that. The most important aspect that you will find in the books that people love to read is that those books are essentially character-driven and scene-driven – just like a novel.
Focus on Character Development
When writing a memoir, you need to bring the entire story to life in a way that makes it page-turning. In the pre-planning phase of writing the memoir, we recommend working on character development. One effective way you can do this is by extensively journaling about you and who you are.
Take notes of the things that you care about and what you did care about at the beginning before the particular event that you are writing about happened. What were your most frequent thoughts when the event happened?
If your readers had followed you around during that time of your life with a video camera, what would they have recorded, and what would they have seen you doing? Jot down the thoughts and feelings that were running through your mind at that time.
Subsequently, bring your readers into the scene – the very moment that one event actually happened. You might also want to develop your character around the people who were close to you at that time.
Show vs. Tell – How to Write
If you want your memoir to have a really wide audience, you need to show what happened in one scene after the other. On that note, starting with an outline can be incredibly helpful when you are writing a memoir that reads like a novel.
You must write in a way that your memoir has elements of the hero’s journey in it. Simultaneously, your memoir needs to have the universal elements of storytelling where the plot must reflect who you were before and show your readers through scenes.
Show your readers the diagnosis of cancer. Start the scene that makes the readers feel involved so they can live the scene with you until you reach the point where you receive the call from the doctor telling you about your health issue.
Final Thoughts
When writing a memoir, you must also keep in mind the essence of scene progression. Think about how the beginning of a movie connects with the middle and end of the movie. You can join writing classes to get this insider information. But we also recommend reading many memoirs and seeing how other authors have done it.
